It's dark out
by deadwolf1989
Summary: It's the end of the world and Tim is just trying to survive the night. One-shot, AU.


It's dark out. The kind of pitch black that creeps into you and settles in your mind and shrouds your thoughts. There's no clouds tonight and yet the stars are hidden, like someone put a veil on them to hide their brightness.

Tim glances at the sky and wonders how long this will last. How many more nights (weeks, months, years) like this will they have to endure before it all ends and there's nothing left but monsters and ruined civilizations?

It's dark out. Tim can hide in the shadows unseen, burrowed in his nest up high, scouting the quiet forest. But the darkness also means everything else can hide and for all his worth, Tim isn't as good at playing hide and seek as the things he's hunting. He's got patience, thank fuck for that, but so do the creatures lurking in the shadows. Every night they're locked in an endless game of cat vs. mouse that only ends when the sun comes up and shines too brightly. Sometimes there's casualties, sometimes there's guns blaring all night and muzzles flashing in the quiet and sometimes the earth is soaked when the sun rises, the dirt greedily drinking the scarlet sacrifices.

It's dark out and Tim is bored out of his fucking mind. He's watchful every night, alert and ready for the slightest movement, but like every night the stillness seeps into his mind, the silence so loud it's pressing against his ears. No insects, no birds, no fucking mice scurrying across the forest floor, the world is bereft of normality when darkness takes over.

The crunching of leaves and twigs from behind doesn't make Tim flinch, but it does makes him tense up, his gaze focusing more intently on the darkness ahead as his ears listen to the footsteps from behind. They come to a stop by Tim's left side _just_ behind his shoulder and out of his peripheral vision. The stillness resumes as the feet settle heavily by his side.

"It's quiet tonight, huh."

"It's always quiet," Tim doesn't add _dipshit_ but it's implied and the intruder knows it.

"You bored yet?"

"Nope."

"Not just a little? I hate this goddamn quiet, it's unsettlin' is what it is"

It's not just the darkness; it's the quiet too. They eat at you, chew on your skin and muscle and bones until there's nothing left and your mind is empty; a void left to be filled. What fills it is what they should be worried about.

"Rachel thinks—"

"Rachel always thinks something"

There's a pause at Tim's interruption and he can feel Raylan's heavy gaze on him, his eyes drilling holes into the side of Tim's head. Tim doesn't have to look to know the expression; it's the one Raylan used to give Tim in the office when he was being an obnoxious little shit.

"Rachel thinks you should take the night off and let Anderson—"

"I don't"

"Tim, you gotta let someone else do the watchin', you ain't the only one who can shoot a—"

"Nah, but I'm the best one, top of my class. Graduated Afghanistan with all the trimmin's"

"It ain't doin' us any favors, you bein' out here all night, every night. You're run down, we can all see it."

There it is. The worry. They all worry too fucking much about the wrong fucking thing. Tim doesn't say it anymore, he used to, but then they lost Martin, McConnell, Andrews, Jackson, Rayes and Jones and he stopped caring about their reasons, their worry.

"D'you remember last time Anderson was on watch? Do you Raylan?"

"Tim…"

"I remember the kids dyin'"

There's a sigh, deep and long, and Tim wishes for the silence, for Raylan to leave and report back to Rachel, for the night to end and for the sun to burn away the inky black.

"I don't think even you could have prevented that-"

There. A slight change in the shadows, a deepening that could easily be missed and that Tim _knows_ Anderson _did_ miss.

"Shut up," and Raylan falls quiet without question. For all his annoying traits, his heedlessness and his skewered, and sometimes absurd, take on situations, Raylan knows when to shut his mouth on Tim's watch.

Beside him Raylan has become frozen, but he thaws after a moment and Tim hears him draw his gun, pull out the radio and speak quietly into the receiver. Tim registers all of this, every little detail like the pitch of Raylan's voice and the crackle from the radio, but he won't remember until the sun is up and he is back at headquarters. When the night is over and the danger has passed.

Tim's gaze is focused through the scope, and everything else slips away as his grip on the Remington tightens and his breathing slows down. Calm settles over him and blankets him from the silence and darkness – words that oughta be spelled with capital letters, but that would give them too much power – and from Raylan's murmured stream of orders. Tim fires the first shot.

It echoes loudly across the forest, the sound travelling like waves through the tall stoic trees, and it's the firing shot that starts a war; chaos breaks out in a semi-circle from Tim and Raylan's position, guns blazing like shooting stars.

"Go, I got your six."

Raylan curses and takes off down the hill, his form lit by the flashes and Tim keeps firing; every shot finding its target and every time they do he sees a face; someone's mother, brother, cousin, friend or lover.

There's no screaming from the darkness, no sounds except for the _pop_, _snap_ and _cracks_ of the guns and the rifle. Occasionally there's a heartbeat of silence, a moment when the firepower retires, and Tim can hear the _thump thump_ of feet across the forest floor, the formation of his team. In that heartbeat he can hear the quiet of the darkness, their shapes becoming slippery and liquid in the shadows as they too gather their strengths for attack.

When the bullets hit there's no satisfaction, there's only the distant, dull sound of bodies hitting the covered forest floor and it somehow makes it worse, knowing that the enemy has no care for each other, that each creature is as expendable as the next. They have no soul, they feel no pain; they only want to consume and tear and destroy everything. And right now the only thing there's left to shatter is the tiny spark of hope that the people in the forest have left. And that ain't gonna be hard if the darkness lasts.

A final _ratatat_ of a machine gun rattles through the forest and then the shadows slip back the way they came, silent and unseen. They do this for a while; attacking without causing damage, with no intend of killing any humans. They do it to tire the rotation teams, almost every night there's an attack and by the end of the week every team is near exhaustion from defending the lines. That's when they really hit hard, when their forces are so great and overpowering that if not caught in time, they'll all be slaughtered. That's what happened to the kids.

The radio by his side crackles and then Raylan's voice filters through.

"Alright, we got the line secure, they ain't comin' through tonight"

"Good training"

"You alright up there for the night?"

"Sure," Tim drawls lazily.

And that's that. The radio goes silent and Tim can hear the teams retreating to their positions, feet stomping none too quietly, and he wonders how they've survived this long. It'll come. The day when everything goes to hell and Tim won't be able to prevent the clusterfuck that is gonna happen.

He resumes his watch and stares down the darkness, eyes skimming across the stillness and logging every detail for later reference. The silence has resumed too, and it's every bit as unnerving as it has been from the beginning, it's the quiet that falls when a predator starts crouching in the shadows as it stalks its prey. It's a quiet that stretches to the sky, spreads across the horizon, as if some divine powers have decided to gamble and all their bets are on the monsters to win.

They don't really know how many people are left; if their group is the _only_ one living together out of fear, necessity and an inane hope for salvation, or if there's a whole world beyond the bounds of the forest. They _have_ explored, sent out scouting teams, but more often than not those teams wouldn't return and if they did, they never brought anything good back with them. So Rachel stopped the searches, she stopped the people from despairing by creating roles and meaning for each person, and somehow she stopped their post-apocalyptic society from collapsing.

Despite Rachel's leadership, despite her efforts to keep up morale, despite the infantry they have, despite every good intention, Tim knows it will never be enough. This isn't where they find redemption; there will be no glory at the end, no trumpets, no medals and no offered meal with a smile and a "thank you for your service". They'll die like this, in the dark, with only each other and the howling quiet as company.

This isn't some fairly tale with a happy ending told to kids before bedtime. This is the nightmare they're living, the reality of too many sins, too much greed and no fear of what lies beyond what science can measure. Tim isn't a God fearing man, in truth Tim doesn't fear much beyond the loss of his rifle, but Tim isn't stupid enough not to fear this. This indescribable void that is slowly filling up the world, eating away at the brightness one day at the time.

Tim hasn't told anyone yet, but he's noticed the days getting shorter and the nights getting longer, and it ain't the seasons changing. It's only a marginal change, but it's creeping up on them. There's no reason for it, but it feels like the sand in the hourglass of humanity is running out. Like they're at the end of the line and it's only a question of time before their light is snuffed out. Tim hasn't told anyone because what good would telling do? It'd create chaos and panic and hysteria and they'd be left with a madness bound for destruction. Maybe Tim's wrong anyway, maybe this is just winter coming faster than he remembers.

The cold is coming and Tim shivers atop the hill, breath turning frosty in the air as the dew settles on the world.

In the midst of everything, in the midst of the horror and the chill of death's reaching hands, Tim finds beauty in the night. He loves the sun and the warmth and the life it brings, but each day it bothers his eyes more, each day his head hurts from being out in the open day. But at night there's no brightness to blind him. There's only the sweet calm of night. That doesn't mean that the night isn't boring as fuck though, when there's nothing to do but stare and wait.

Still, there's something alluring about the darkness, a sort of drugged-up, adrenaline kick that screams: "get out while you can", but still has a pull on you with claws and teeth dripping of gilded promises of guts and glory. It's almost like the call of every gunfight Tim has been in, be it the madness of Afghanistan or the mindless killings of the Lexington office. He knows it's insanity in a gift wrapped box, yet he hears the call and wants to answer it. That doesn't mean he has any intentions of doing so, but the fact that it's _there_, whispering in his ears and stroking ghostly fingers across his skin does nothing to settle his mind.

In the midst of all this shit, Tim does not have time for a mental breakdown.

He hunkers down and tries to keep the maddening thoughts at bay, tries to remember that soon the sun will come and evaporate the cloying mist clogging his brain. He holds on to that thought – the miniscule flickering flame of optimism – that someday this will all be in the past and they'll triumph. He doesn't believe any of it – that's not the point – no the point is to stay alive through the night and see the end of the darkness without losing too much of himself.

Tim hasn't figured out how it works yet, how the monsters keep doubling, it's like they're just spawning from the spots that previously held life. It doesn't make sense because every time Tim _sees_ them through the scope of his rifle it feels like he should know the monsters, there's something disturbingly familiar about them. Like he's already seen them before and they're only getting reacquainted. But that doesn't make sense, none of this bullshit makes sense, but the feeling in his gut won't go away. It's gnawing and chewing and sometimes after a long night of shooting Tim will bend over behind a tree and throw up his meager dinner.

But what's most disturbing is that every time Tim tries to gather his thoughts, rationalize and put all the pieces together, his attention wavers and it's like trying to hold water in two cupped hands; impossible. Most of the time his thoughts are muddy at night and sometimes thinking feels like wading through treacle. Maybe that's part of the monsters' agenda; to ensure that people don't figure them out, can't figure them out, and that their thoughts are kept scattered.

The dew settles firmly and Tim can feel the dampness seeping into his clothes and turning them clammy against his skin. It's going to be a long night, like every night, especially now that the attack came so early and Tim tries to conserve his energy. He's in for a long haul and will need it against the darkness.

Hours tick by with little change to the blackness ahead and from his position Tim can hear the steady deterioration of the teams; it's not so much their morale as it is their sanity dissolving. Slowly, the darkness is getting to them and as it does their movements become constant and louder as the minutes creep by. It's the wee hours before relief that really gets to them, when they can almost taste the freedom of the sun, the men start to _snap_. It's not an audible sound, unless you're listening for it, but it's there; in the black stillness of the night, insanity is lurking around the corner, festering and oozing and waiting for its turn.

It's dark out and Tim isn't so sure anymore if the sun is every going to rise. The thought seems silly (_of course it'll rise, in due time_), but he's been keeping track of time, as he does every night, and today it's late. Well, later than it has been most nights anyway. It's as if the otherwise predictable delay of sunrise has suddenly skipped ahead ten steps.

"The sun's up," says Rachel, her voice scratchy and broken through the cheap speaker of the radio.

Tim blinks. Once, twice and picks up the radio, the world snapping back into focus like a camera lens adjusting, but there's something skewered and broken about it, like the camera was dropped and the glass has cracked.

The world isn't soaked in black anymore; it's flooded in light hues of orange and pink, shadows from the trees stretching like spidery fingers to Tim's hideout. Everything is tinted in warmth and there's a glow to the world that seems unearthly. He can hear rustling and bustling in the forest below, like life has resumed again and has been at it for a while. A quick glance around and Tim realizes that the teams have gone, nothing but trampled underbrush and shell casings that glitters like gold left in their wake. Tim could've sworn it was pitch black a moment ago.

"Yes, sir," the response is automatic, drilled into him during ranger school, and Rachel has long since stopped complaining, finally accepting her status for what it is.

"Come find me and have breakfast when you come back," she doesn't add _that's an order_, there's no need.

Tim picks up his rifle, slinging it across his right shoulder, grip tightening around the strap as he shields his eyes from the sun. From his position atop the cliff, Tim can see the sun in the horizon; it has barely risen and already its shine burns his skin, the warmth feeling uncomfortable like a brand.

Tim has given up on all wishes except for one; wishing he'd wake up.

It's dark out.


End file.
